“It was a giant failure”: the flop 1985 movie Ethan Hawke called “the best thing that ever happened”
Everyone involved in every movie wants it to be a hit, and whenever a picture is declared dead on arrival, the last thing anybody is thinking of doing is punching the air in joyous celebration.
After all, an ignominious flop reflects badly on the studio, the screenwriters, and the filmmakers, while being associated with a production that loses a fortune and takes a battering from critics and audiences alike can tarnish an actor’s reputation by association, sending them straight back to square one.
Fittingly, Ethan Hawke was literally at square one when it happened to him, with the first-time thespian having high hopes for his debut feature. He wasn’t the only one, and instead of letting it get to him, he’s admitted that his debut movie dying a slow and painful death on the big screen was a blessing.
On paper, Joe Dante’s Explorers should have been a hit. The director’s previous film was Gremlins, and with Industrial Light & Magic on visual effects duties, the legendary Rob Bottin handling the practical effects, and an accessible, high-concept premise that painted it as a spiritual successor to Steven Spielberg’s ET, it had everything in its locker to score a big win at the box office.
Unfortunately, apart from the fact that it wasn’t very good on a storytelling level, Explorers suffered the misfortune of opening on the same weekend as Live Aid, which ensured millions remained glued to their televisions, and seven days after Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, which was a phenomenon.
It was about as inauspicious a star as Hawke could have hoped for, but with the benefit of hindsight, he was happy that it crashed and burned. “The irony for me is that I think the best thing that ever happened to me, as far as life in the arts is concerned, is the failure of Explorers,” he shared. “I was 14 years old, and this movie was supposed to be huge.”
With one eye on a prime summer release date, Dante was put under pressure by Paramount to have the movie ready by July, and while it was, the rapid timeline affected the final product. “They spent a fortune on it, and it was a giant fiscal and critical failure,” Hawke acknowledged. “But what it did was prepare me to not believe the hype. I so believed the hype on that.”
In the build-up to Explorers‘ release, he was getting increasingly high on his own supply, having become convinced that “it was going to be the next ET and my whole life would change.” As it turned out, absolutely nothing changed, and it did even less for his career, with another four years passing before the youngster was seen onscreen again.
His sophomore effort fared much better, with Dead Poets Society doing everything that Explorers didn’t by giving Hawke a plum role in a popular, well-liked, unanimously praised, and profitable film. At the second time of asking, he was off to the races at last.
